Rechercher

10/03/2011

Peter Heinlein, VOAEthiopia is cutting back by as much as 90 percent the number of inter-country adoptions it will allow, as part of an effort to clean up a system rife with fraud and corruption. Adoption agencies and children’s advocates are concerned the cutbacks will leave many Ethiopian orphans without the last-resort option of an adoptive home abroad.

Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women’s, Children’s and Youth Affairs has issued a directive saying it will process a maximum of five inter-country adoptions a day, effective March 10. Currently, the ministry is processing up to 50 cases a day, about half of them to the United States.A copy of the directive provided to VOA says the reduction of up to 90 percent in cases will allow closer scrutiny of documents used to verify a child’s orphan status.

Ministry spokesman Abiy Ephrem says the action was taken in response to indications of widespread fraud in the adoption process.“What we have seen so far has been some illegal practices. There is an abuse. There are some cases that are illegal. So these directives will pave the way to come up with [safeguards],” said Abiy Ephrem.

Investigations have turned up evidence of unscrupulous operators in some cases tricking Ethiopian parents to give up their children, then falsifying documents in order claim a part of the large fees involved in inter country adoptions.American couples often pay more than $20,000 to adopt an Ethiopian child. Such amounts are an enormous temptation in a country where the average family earns a few hundred dollars a month.

U.S. State Department statistics show more than 2,500 Ethiopian orphans went to the United States last year. That is more than a ten fold increase over the past few years, making Ethiopia the second most popular destination for Americans seeking to adopt overseas, after China.Child protection professionals generally welcomed efforts to clean up the system.Some, however, questioned the motive behind the cutback. One adoption agency representative who asked not to be identified called the policy “ridiculous”, and said it appears to be in retaliation for recent criticism of the government’s lax oversight of the process.Abigail Rupp, head of the consular section at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa says the cutback is likely to result in a drop in adoptions to the United States from last year’s 2,500 to fewer than 500. She says the biggest concern is for the estimated 1,000 children currently in the adoptions pipeline, who may be forced to wait more than a year for their cases to be considered.

“We share the government’s concerns about the vulnerabilities in the process. But certainly we have concerns about children who would be waiting longer for their adoptions to be final. That would mean they would be in an orphanage or transition home for a longer period of time,” she said.Rupp said adoption agencies in Ethiopia should take the directive as a cue to be accountable for each case they bring forward, including knowing exactly how children in orphanages came to be there. She said government officials have indicated they may close as many as 45 orphanages as part of the effort to clean up what critics have labeled a “baby business”.

Ted Chaiban, head of the Addis Ababa office of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, called the new rules “an important step” in rooting out irregularities in the system and finding family-based local solutions for what the government estimates are 5 million Ethiopian orphans.

“What is important is that any child deemed to require care be looked at in terms of a range of options starting from family reunification all the way through inter country adoption. In that respect the work being done by the ministry needs to be strengthened and supported,” he said.

U.S. Embassy officials late Friday indicated they are posting an adoption alert on the State Department’s website addressing the concerns of Americans who will be affected by the Ethiopian government directive. The alert can be seen at www.adoptions.state.gov.

Ministry spokesman Abiy Ephrem vertelde dat deze actie genomen was in antwoord op de indicaties van wijdverspreide fraude in het adoptieproces. ”What we have seen so far has been some illegal practices. There is an abuse. There are some cases that are illegal. So these directives will pave the way to come up with safeguards,” said Abiy Ephrem.

Ted Chaiban, Hoofd van het Addis Ababa office van UNICEF, heeft de nieuwe regeles een belangrijke stap voorwaarts genoemd om de misstanden in het systeem weg e nemen en lokale family-based oplossingen te zoeken voor de ongeveer 5 miljoen Ethiopische weeskinderen. ”What is important is that any child deemed to require care be looked at in terms of a range of options starting from family reunification all the way through inter country adoption. In that respect the work being done by the ministry needs to be strengthened and supported,” he said.

In 2009, Dutch adoption agency Wereldkinderen contracted to conduct research into the correctness of adoption files of children adopted from Ethiopia. In October 2009, a report was finished, which summarized investigations into 25 randomly selected adoption files of children adopted from Ethiopia between 2004 and 2009. 19 of these 25 cases contained at least some irregularities, which are analyzed in the report.

When I wrote Part I of "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" nearly a year and eight months ago[1], the heartbreaking and outrageous scandal in the broken adoption system in Ethiopia was a shocking molestation crime committed against two recently adopted Ethiopian children -- one barely 2 and the other 4 years old -- by their French parents. The father was jailed for rape and violence, and the mother for failure to report a crime. The attitude of the Ethiopian adoption officials interviewed in that case was a nauseatingly indifferent, "S_ _ t happens!"

16/03/2010

Australians caught in Ethiopian adoption nightmare. Australian families have made serious allegations of corruption within Australia's inter-country adoption program with Ethiopia.

The ABC has spoken to several families who claim they have been lied to in the course of their adoption process.

They have told heartbreaking stories of their time in Ethiopia - from witnessing their new baby choking on vomit, to a young boy being kept in a bucket to stop him from moving about. One family had to pay a bribe and others found their paperwork falsified with their child's age dramatically altered.

The families say the Federal Government has been slow to act and has not fully investigated the allegations.

When Jody was holding her baby son in her arms, she was distraught to witness an Ethiopian mother discover she had lost hers forever.

"When I was walking [out of the women's centre] a lady screamed and yelled and cried and fell to the ground," she said.

"This mother had come back to the women's shelter [where] she'd placed her baby for adoption. She changed her mind and came back to get it within a couple of days - but it was already gone.

"That was just heart-wrenching and I felt sick."

She added that she thought the process was far too quick to have gone through the proper channels.

Last year Foreign Correspondent revealed corruption within US-Ethiopia adoptions, and more families have spoken out as a result.

It seems some Australians are not protected from corruption despite it being an Australian Government-run program.

The person in charge of the program is Ato Lakew Gebeyehu. ABC News Online made a number of attempts to contact Mr Gebeyehu, but was unable to do so.

Mr Gebeyehu is responsible for Koala House, a transition home for children going to be adopted by Australian families. This home, which is part of the Australian government program, is accused of not properly feeding the children and maintaining their health.

The office of Attorney-General Robert McClelland says a recent review found issues of concern within the program and is working to restructure the program.

ABC News Online has been told by a spokesman for Mr McClelland that Australia will sign a new agreement with Ethiopia, however whether Mr Gebeyehu remains in his position is still to be decided.

But the ABC has obtained documents showing the Howard government knew of serious concerns about the program in 2005 and that the Rudd government was warned again in 2008 by Brussels-based human rights organisation Against Child Trafficking.

Koala House

The families interviewed by the ABC have had their names changed because of fears they may lose their children and concerns that life will be made hard for surviving biological relatives in Ethiopia.

Australian parents pay thousands of dollars in fees, donations and aid for the care of their children in Koala House.

But all three families say their children were handed to them with a range of problems including severe malnutrition and pneumonia.

Sarah, who has adopted three Ethiopian children, believes the money she paid to care for her children never reached them.

"In our first adoption we took over about 80 kilos of aid. The majority of that was formula, and because we had a baby we also paid the formula fee for her," she said.

"We were also asked to replace all of the formula she would have consumed during her time she was at Koala House ... and it turned out she was actually fed cow's milk and was lactose intolerant.

"She was massively malnourished when we got her. She had full-blown pneumonia because she'd been swallowing her own vomit."

Sarah's older daughter later explained that she was hardly fed.

"She'd get given rice and carrot mixed together as a meal of porridge for breakfast. Except for when the Australian families came ... [they] would put on a big party ... and when that happened, there would be so much food. But when those families went, then it'd be carrot and rice," she said.

Jody says it was a similar story when she and her husband were in Ethiopia to collect their son from Koala House.

"Our son has attachment issues, but he was never held or cuddled until we got him. He was just picked up to be changed or had a bottle propped up on a pillow," she said.

"We were told when we picked him up that they used to sit him in a bucket so he couldn't learn to move around much. He'd worn all the hair off the back of his head from it rubbing against the bucket.

"A friend of ours had an older child who says they only get one meal a day, which was concerning because the amount of money that we raised for the centre. I raised thousands and thousands."

Program reinstated

Earlier this month Mr McClelland announced he will lift a temporary suspension of the adoption program, after concerns of possible breaches of the Hague Convention on inter-country adoption.

The convention is in place to ensure the welfare of children is the priority and that international adoptions are used only as a last resort. Australia is a signatory to the convention but Ethiopia is not.

It will resume operating on April 6 with some changes made, but it appears Mr Gebeyehu will stay in charge.

Against Child Trafficking spokeswoman Roelie Post says Mr Gebeyehu was arrested in Ethiopia and held for 12 days on suspicion of trafficking children to Austria in 2008.

Ms Post says her organisation received little response from the Australian Government after alerting it to this and other alleged concerning practices.

"The children are not orphans. The paperwork is often faked. Parents are declared dead who are not dead and children are given the wrong ages," she said.

"Our organisation sent a letter to the Australian Government with 1,600 pages attached to it with evidence of trafficking in adoptions relating to Australia and India.

"Also we alerted the Australian authorities to Ethiopia, especially to the Ethiopian representative whose name was mentioned in a trafficking case in Austria."

Ms Post does not accept the Australian Government's explanation that Mr Gebeyehu's arrest was just a case of mistaken identity. She thinks there are serious issues that need to be investigated and that the case was mishandled.

"The children come from the same pool, therefore the situation [in Australia] is comparable to adoptions in the US or the Netherlands or any other country."

Sarah says she is aware of older adoptive children recognising each other from Ethiopia and while she stops short of calling it child trafficking, she says it is "on the fringes".

"I have heard that has happened in Australia, where children have known each other prior to coming under Lakew's care - that's a very big coincidence," she said.

Blocked

All families interviewed by the ABC claim they were not supplied with paperwork and vital information about their children and were blocked by officials from finding information on biological families.

When Anne and her husband adopted their daughter, they say almost all the information about their child's origin was falsified.

They were told she was abandoned, but when through their own search they tracked down the biological parents, they discovered this was a lie.

"The [birth parents] were both devastated, particularly the father. They were so sad to think that their child would have grown up thinking she had been abandoned by them.

"They told us that they could never have done such a thing to their child. They agonised over the decision to relinquish their daughter and they did it legitimately.

"What makes us angry is that our daughter was stripped of her history and there seems to be no valid reason for this to have happened.

"Our child was given a new name and a new birth date and was passed off as having been abandoned."

Sarah adopted two sisters in 2002. She and her husband were told the "orphaned" children were four years old and nine months, with no living relatives.

They later found the eldest daughter was not four, but closer to eight. They also discovered the girls had a mother and that the eldest had two brothers whom she was allegedly warned never to mention.

"She told us exactly where they were and we located them two days later and the brothers told us at the time that she was eight years old," she said.

Jody was also told that her son was abandoned and there was no information about his mother. But years later when her family returned to Ethiopia for their second adoption, they discovered this was not the case.

"With a bit of what we call African persuasion, which is $500, we managed to get a photograph, full name and full details of his birth mother," she said.

Newspaper TROUW published this weekend that the biggest Adoption Agency WERELDKINDEREN (Children of the World) and a small one will (temporarily) stops adoptions from Ethiopia.

Field research and analysis of relinquishment and adoption files in Ethiopia and in the Netherlands did show great concern about the practices of adoption and the legitimacy of adoptions from this country.

It has taken several years in the Netherlands since the closing of the Austrian Adoption Agency Family for You (an Euradopt member) was summoned by the Austrian government to close their doors due childtrafficking and childtrade for adoption from Ethiopia to Austria.

Euradopt partner Wereldkinderen was alert since this news and started their own investigation. An task which the Dutch government should have done as member of the Hague Treaty for Adoption. Now another adoption agency closed since the news of Wereldkinderen also their adoption channel from Ethiopia.

The Dutch government said not to do anything against this situation. At least not before Wereldkinderen finalised their investigation regarding the adoptions from Ethiopia. A remarkable comment from the Dutch Authorities since they prohibited the proposal for investigation in China recently. One of the reasons why former director of this agency decided to resign. It might be, that the interest for trade and diplomatic relationships with Ethiopia is less important for the Dutch government as with China.

This weekend 3-5 couples where preparing to depart to Ethiopia but have been informed not to go.